Stepping Stone
by stironniganisreal
Summary: "It doesn't quite feel real, as I step through the threshold of the humble bungalow I celebrated my sixteenth birthday in." - A few months following Aven's defeat, Alex returns to her old family home in Freya. Oneshot.


**Hi. So. Um. I've been a bit haywire lately. Some of you may have noticed. Some of you would know I'm currently travelling overseas, which is why there isn't much on the fanfic front lately. Some of you are probably going to throw a bin at me for not producing my regular fics.**

 **I apologise! I do post some shorter fics on my IG fan account, but there's not a whole lot more of those. Anyway, disclaimer, because I can only wish I owned the Medoran Chronicles**

 **Also, might be a bit of a trigger warning in this (Mental health issues)**

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This was the last home I shared with my parents.

It doesn't quite feel real, as I step through the threshold of the humble bungalow I celebrated my sixteenth birthday in. I can hear the rumble of the waves from the small beach we owned, the hushing shift of the wind in the trees. Having not been inhabited since last August, it's dark and desolate and cobwebbed. It seems emptier than it should be, and I keep expecting my parents to cheerfully call out for me.

Feeling unsettled, I fold my arms over my chest. I wish I'd said yes when Kaiden offered to accompany me, but I also, in a way, felt like he would be intruding. This house belongs to a different Alex, not the same Alex he knows and loves.

I reach the end of the short hallway that leads from the front door and gaze at the shared living space before me. For as long as I've known, my family has never been wealthy. You can tell by the furnishing before me, all cheaper, practical furniture. The personalisation of the room was packed away in my parents' transfer to Medora, so there's a definite oddity, some kind of ghosting vacancy.

I walk through the lounge chairs and coffee table gathered together to form a sitting room, the couches bare without my grandmother's cushions that she embroidered by hand decades ago, to adorn them. The coffee table is equally stripped, without its usual fuss of trinkets and empty coffee mugs and numerous travel brochures.

The round table, circled by six hard-backed wooden seats, though only three were ever regularly occupied, hosts a single personal item. I stare at it. There is the centrepiece I'd always been repulsed by because it was carved from an elephant's tusk, and I'd never been able to stop wondering whether that poor elephant had been killed for its ivory tusk, or less cruelly, captured and had it sawed off.

I moved through the kitchen. Most of the cupboards and appliances are devoid and covered in a thin carpet of dust, but one of the cupboards still holds my mother's collection of exotic teas. I take the ones I remember liking, and toss their tins into the leather satchel bumping at my hip.

I look around at the kitchen, my throat clogging as I recall all of the memories in here. My parents pouring over a book of Medoran geography I'd brought back for them after one of my training days with Karter. My mother attempting and failing to teach me to bake — to this day, the only sort of cooking I'm decent at is food you can do over a fire, mostly barbecuing and stir-frying and really anything with no set recipes to abide by. My father tuning the wireless radio, and his glee when he found a station that played exclusively Elvis. Their eager chatter, Medora and archaeology and travelling and me, echoing from this cavernous room throughout the house. The occasional burst of their shared laughter, a sound I always waited for and a sound I'll never hear again. My only half mocking disgust when my father openly kissed my mother —

There's a loud bang as I drop one of the tins of rejected tea. I realise I'm trembling, like what always happens these days when I spend too long thinking about one of my loved ones that are now six feet under. Or in my parents' case, their ashes drifting somewhere across an Ancient Egyptian site.

Usually my friends or my boyfriend are around when I've blanked out or had an attack, which was undoubtedly why Kaiden asked if he should come. Admittedly, I'm a lot better now then I was a few months ago, when Aven's defeat was still fresh in everyone's minds. Flashbacks and panic attacks plagued me frequently, I developed anxiety, I'd lost weight, and I was severely sleep deprived thanks to the nightmares. I looked and felt like hell. It'd taken a while for me to relent to seeing someone, and that final hit on the head was because when Evie Ronnigan made an innocent comment about my struggling wellbeing, which had completely broken my heart.

I shake my head to clear my thoughts. One of the practises Dr Monroe, my personal therapist that Dix ensured wouldn't rat me out to any sticky beaks, has nudged into me is to not linger on triggering thoughts. It's a lot harder when I'm doing something like visiting my parents' old house or Niyx's grave, but that's expected. And I cleared it with Dr Monroe, who insisted it'd be a good stepping stone in the healing process if I took it gently.

The office is next. It's an explosion of their careers, and it's unmistakeable to any outsiders that this is the office of archaeologists. Prizes, minor artefacts, framed photographs and texts, scrolls, textbooks, other leather-bound books, and absolutely endless documents, folders and files are crammed into the space. There's barely any space to reach the two wheeled recliner office chairs or the forgotten Chromebooks.

I don't spend long in here. I've never shared anything close to my parents' love of archaeology, which I often felt like they adored more than me.

When Aven sent his minions to torture and kill my parents, the only person I'd talk about it to was Kaiden. After all, he too had lost his parents — just at an entirely different age, in an entirely different circumstance. He completely understood the loneliness, the self-blaming, the overwhelming guilt and grief. He couldn't relate quite as well to the chilling sadness that I didn't have any family left, but I'd still appreciated his comfort.

Despite both that and Tia Auras, it took me a while to accept what Kaiden so obviously harboured for me. I'd pushed him away, just like I had with everyone else, in those shadowing weeks of Aven's defeat. Then when I'd let my closest friends back in and allowed them to start looking out for me, that was around the same time Bear and Declan started dating. So of course, Kaiden started hanging around.

At first it'd been unbearable. I'd barely spoken to him. But he'd nudged at me, slowly, carefully and gently, like an ocean gradually wearing down a cliff, and before I knew it we were both pining for each other like pathetic, twitterpated idiots. His presence became excruciating for a new reason. Eventually, between our friends, they became so fed up with it that they sent us on a date. Which ended in an unexplainably mind-blowing kiss and him asking me to be his girlfriend.

Now I'm standing in the middle of the office and sporting a small, silly grin. The expression falls from my face once I remember exactly where I am.

I barely skim a gaze into the bathroom — I'd never been a fan of this particular bathroom, since the bathtub was too small to properly host even my mother, who was the shortest in our family of three. Also, the water pressure in the shower was pretty crap. There isn't any memories that are good or worthy enough to be associated with this room, so I move on.

… which is my old bedroom.

It's bizarre standing in here. I haven't really had a room that was exclusively and officially mine in just under two years. It's smaller than both the dorm I share with Dix and any of the bedrooms I've stayed in whilst at the Ronnigans.

I look at it. Clean white walls, a slightly sloping ceiling, long timber panelled floor. It's a narrow room. Directly adjacent to the door is a window which looks out onto the small yard and the winding path that connects it to the beach. I can faintly see the ocean from here. My bed is positioned beside the window, flush against the same wall. The twin single hosts two pillows and a duvet, all sporting jade green covers. Beside the bed is a nightstand with three items. A lamp, a framed photo of me when I was a chubby toddler cradled in the arms of my grandmother, and a whittled Chinese dragon I purchased from a market stall in Beijing.

I tuck the dragon and the photograph into my bag. I detach the few posters from the walls — one for an Olympic Games I attended when I was eleven, a Harry Potter movie poster, other people's drawings collected over the years, a few photos of various Freyan landscapes. Then I cross the room and open the chest of drawers, finding them mostly empty, save for a few pieces of clothing I'd have grown out of by now. I close them, disappointed by my lack of findings.

My parents' room doesn't hide too many other treasures. I retrieve my father's old army jacket from the closet. The rest of the house proves just as fruitless; I'll have to pay a visit to the family storage shed to retrieve all of our emotionally personal belongings.

My satchel now considerably heavier, I step out onto the front porch. As I gaze out at the modesty of it, the woven wicker chairs and the maroon hammock tilting gently in the salty breeze, tears begin to gather in my eyes. It's this porch that's the worst of it — the memories here are so thick and multiple that I'm surprised they're not hanging in the air like coloured smoke.

I remember my parents seated in those wicker chairs, their hands linked together and smiling absently as they thumb through their respective novels. I remember swaying in that hammock on a lazy Sunday afternoon, plugged into my iPod Nano with a chilled glass of Coke in my hand. I remember playing cards and arguing over a Monopoly board. I remember sitting with my father on those weathered steps, taking turns at strumming at a guitar, learning a song bit by bit. I remember, I remember, I remember.

My satchel falls to the ground with a sort thud, and I'm in a daze as I set out across the yard towards the beach. When we first moved in here, about a month shy of my sixteenth, I asked my parents if we could finally get a pet, since we had the space.

They said no. I found out why later that night, when they told me they'd accepted the year-long archaeology offer in Siberia.

For years I'd secretly hated how I was second best for them, how their careers would unfailingly come first. It was a sore spot, to know I'd never get the same opportunities and experiences as most other girls my age. I had always wondered how I was supposed to gather qualifications and funds for university and to get a job, when I'd been homeschooled for the wider part of my educational life.

Then they'd died, and I felt so guilty that I'd throw up, because I spent so long resenting them. My parents never had a lot of money — they had pretty bad debt just before I was born. They could have left me to be raised by my grandmother, but they took me with them, even though I was another mouth to feed. Even though most of the money they earned at one digsite was spent getting to the next, they always put some aside for my birthday, which was always our biggest indulgence-classified expense of the year. Granted, their careers were put before me so many times I lost count, but at least they still unfailingly loved me.

To be honest, what I feel about my parents isn't easy to explain.

As I'm walking down the winding path down to the beach, I secretly realise that at some point, both Kaiden and I lived by the sea. Well, he was raised beside it. Only the Jameses have money — you can tell by the size of their house, that Kaiden isn't depending on a scholarship at the academy like me, how casual my boyfriend is when it comes to spending money. Same goes with the rest of my friends — most of them have been raised in wealthy households, and know no different. They don't think twice about purchasing something expensive if it means a better deal. On the other hand, I'm constantly paranoid and calculating about exactly how much is in my bank account.

It is hard, being by myself. I'll admit that. Barely any money, no official dwelling, no family. I've been planning to get a summer job these holidays, and D.C. had offered to get me Medoran citizenship. But I'm not sure how much longer I can take my friends' charity — they definitely shouldn't be coddling me.

I reach the beach. I kick out of my Converse and peel off my socks, moving down the sand towards the ocean. Grainy sand kicks up from my toes and the salty wind beats at me, flapping my clothing and whipping my hair. It's late afternoon and a storm is rolling in — and I remember.

I remember waking up at dawn to dive into the waves, navigating the tide and ploughing through the icy water like a marine animal, until my father appeared at the edge of the path and hollered it was breakfast time. I remember picnics on the sand, and my parents combing the rocks for fossils. I remember when my father collected driftwood and shells and strung them together to form a wind chime. I remember my mother fussing that I was out in the sea by myself, bringing up shark attacks and currents that would drag me out to sea, and then a pod of dolphins appeared about twenty metres out in the water, as if to say that there was really nothing to fear.

When it comes to my parents, all I can do is remember. There aren't new memories to make.

They never got to properly see Medora. They never got to meet my dearest friends. They never got to age together. They never got to retire, settle down somewhere. They never got to see me past graduating school. They never got to see me and Kaiden as an actual couple, and how happy he makes me. I'll never again hear them talking about archaeology a mile a minute. I'll never again have my mother fuss over me and my father treat me like I'm seven instead of seventeen. I'll never again see my parents.

And if I'd never taken them to Medora, then they'd never have died at the hands of Aven. I could be sitting on this beach with them now, like one of our family picnics, watching the storm roll in. Or I'd be directing a Library portal to, say, a digsite in remote Peru, so I could visit them.

I've sat down, or more accurately, crumpled in a heap. Sand is likely now where sand isn't supposed to be. My cheeks are wet, but not from sea spray or the droplets beginning to dribble down from the churning grey skies. I'm sad because my parents were killed brutally. I'm sad because I don't have any family left and it scares me. I'm sad because I don't know whether to mourn my parents or resent them. I'm sad because I shouldn't even have that sort of internal battle, and yet I do. I'm sad because I still have so many struggles left to go through.

I sit there on the sand, and remain there even when the storm breaks. I'm saturated within ten minutes, as the wind snaps at me and the rain is like tiny shards of ice, but I still sit there. I've endured worse, much worse.

It's only when it actually becomes dark do I get to my feet and stumble across the sand. My shoes, socks and bag are just as soaked as I am, but I don't care.

The usual old portal back to Medora, with its customary relentless blasts of wind, dry me instantly. I find myself standing in the cave, the same place as always, wondering why I can't open up another doorway. A moment later, my question is answered when warm arms slide around my waist from behind.

I sigh, both in content and emotional exhaustion, and lean back into Kaiden. He's likely just finished with Athora — there's no other explanation for his immediate presence in the cave.

"You smell nice," he murmurs, nuzzling into the space between my shoulder and neck. Of course the scent of the ocean appeals to him. "How'd you go in Freya?"

My breath catches in my throat. "Okay, I guess. Am I supposed to bring you back with me?"

"I'm guessing so. Athora seemed pretty smug about something when he opened up a doorway for me. And don't change the subject."

Typical. First thing he thinks of is me. Though I suppose he has good reason to right now. I incline my chin, tipping my head back. "It was hard. I blanked out a few times, but I didn't completely pass out or have a full-on attack. It was easier that everything had been packed away before my parents moved to Medora, so the memories weren't as intense. But I'll need to go back and take what belongings I actually want."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

I consider his words as he steps out from behind me, detangling himself from me and reaching to slide his fingers through mine. Together we wander towards the edge of the cavern, where I open up another doorway for us to step through. It's only once we're both standing in the foyer of the academy foyer do I respond to his question.

"Hmm, yeah. But Jordan would go out of his tree if you were the only one I took to Freya."

Kaiden chuckles at this. "How about all of us, then?"

I shoot him a wry look "What, did they put you up to this?"

The look he pulls is only half innocent. "Well, now you brought it up …"

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 **I hope you guys enjoyed that! I'll try and put some more up when I can!**


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